She had killed Karitha and had discovered that demons were just as picky as gods in how they were summoned.
She had killed Serem, and she really wasn’t even sure why, because by then she had known what would happen. She didn’t know the incantations, the ingredients, or the mystic gestures. She didn’t even know the names of any of the spells. And of course, she had no athame and could not make one; she had only the Black Dagger, instead.
Maybe the dagger was her reason for killing him, she thought, in frustration over his part in saddling her with it. True, it had given her power and strength, and it had saved her from that awful drunk, but it was so maddening, having this magic right there in her hands and not understanding any of it.
She hadn’t really thought the dagger had influenced her at the time, but yes, she admitted to herself, it probably had something to do with it.
Whatever the reason, she had killed him, and it hadn’t done any good.
And finally, just a few days before, she had killed a witch by the name of Kelder of Quarter Street. She had seen him at Ser-em’s funeral and had followed him home. That had some result, anyway—she seemed to have acquired at least one new ability; she could feel odd, sometimes incomprehensible bits of sensation fairly often, especially when near other people.
She could not, however, make very much sense of them. She was no apprentice; she had no one to tell her what anything meant. When she sensed a wet heat from a man’s thoughts, or an image of red velvet, or a tension like the air before a thunderstorm, what did that represent? The cool blackness from the potted daisies here in her room at the inn—was that normal? Did it mean they were thriving, or dying?
The truth was that she could gain more useful information about the world and its creatures through her canine sense of smell than through any of her supernatural abilities.
And her warlockry seemed to be getting worse. Not by itself; at first, she had thought she was just being distracted, or forgetting what she had managed to learn, but now, looking back on it, she was fairly certain that every time she had killed another magician, her warlockry had weakened. The effect was most noticeable when she added witchcraft to her collection of skills. Now she had to listen intently to find that whisper; it wasn’t intruding uninvited as it had at first.
Did the different magicks interfere with each other, like kittens stumbling over their litter-mates?
If she had killed a witch first, could she have made sense of what she saw and felt? Would she be able to do more, even without training?
It was all rather discouraging. There was so much she didn’t know. Here she had, at least in theory, the ability to perform five different kinds of magic, and she didn’t know how to use any of them properly! And no matter what she did, no matter how powerful, how fast, how perceptive she became, she still looked like a ragged half- grown thief, and those around her still treated her accordingly. She had had to pay cash in advance for this room, and the innkeeper had clearly been astonished when Tabaea had pulled out a handful of silver.
And she couldn’t tell anyone about any of it; there was no one she could trust, no one she could talk to. If she ever admitted anything, they would all know that she was a murderer, and she’d be hanged.
It just wasn’t working out the way she had thought it would.
There had to be something she could do to make it work, though. Maybe if she knew more about all the different kinds of magic, she thought, she would be able to get some use out of them. She couldn’t just steal the knowledge, of course—the Black Dagger didn’t work that way; she now knew that beyond any doubt, she would never learn anything from it.
And of course, she was too old to be an apprentice. She was nineteen, almost twenty.
But maybe, if she listened—she had superhuman hearing now, at least in the upper registers, thanks to a dozen dead animals. She could get in anywhere, with her lockpicking and house-breaking skills, her animal stealth, her stolen strength, and her warlockry.
If she crept into a magician’s home and watched and listened, if she found a new apprentice just beginning his training...
It was certainly worth a try.
Moving like a cat—not figuratively, but literally—she leaped from the bed and crept to the door, then down the hall, down the stair, through the common room, and out into the gathering night.
CHAPTER 17
The legendary assassins’ cult of Demerchan, Captain Jikri assured Lady Sarai, was quite real and headquartered somewhere in the Small Kingdoms; beyond that he knew nothing definite. At Lady Sarai’s insistence, Tikri sent a well-funded agent to attempt to learn more.
Until the agent returned there was nothing else to be done about Demerchan, so Sarai turned her attention to other organizations, ones that happened to be closer at hand—the organizations that represented the different schools of magic. She knew of five—the Wizards’ Guild, the Council of Warlocks, the Brotherhood, the Sisterhood, and the Hierarchy of Priests. Neither sorcerers nor demonologists nor any of the lesser sorts of magicians, such as herbalists or scientists, seemed to have any unifying body—at least, four years of research into magic had failed to find any sign of one operating in Ethshar.
Lady Sarai didn’t think it was worth worrying about herbalists or the like, and she couldn’t do much about the sorcerers or demonologists, but the five known groups definitely wanted attention—especially the wizards and warlocks, since the killers had left indications of wizardry and warlockry.
The Wizards’ Guild was by far the most powerful of the organizations—every wizard was a member, bound by Guild rules, as well she knew. Every wizard in the World was responsible to his or her local Guildmaster.
Most people thought that the Guildmasters ran everything, but Sarai knew better. She had learned a year before that the Guildmasters, popularly believed to all be equals in the government of the Wizards’ Guild, in fact answered to a select few called the Inner Circle—that secret, she was given to understand, could cost her her life if she were too free in its dissemination.
If she wanted to speak to someone with real power in the Wizards’ Guild, she knew she should speak to a member of the Inner Circle—but if the very existence of the Inner Circle was secret, she could hardly expect anyone to tell her who was a member.
Serem the Wise might or might not have been a member; her informant thought that he had been. This particular rumor had come up in a discussion of Serem’s apparent successor as the senior Guildmaster in Ethshar of the Sands—Telurinon of the Black Robe was definitely not a member of the Inner Circle and was said to have hopes of changing that.
But if Telurinon was not in the Inner Circle, was he really the city’s senior member of the Guild?
Well, whether he was or not, he was her best possible contact with the Guild; she sent him a message asking if a private meeting could be arranged for her to speak to the Guild’s representatives in Ethshar of the Sands.
While she waited for a reply, she considered the other organizations.
The Council of Warlocks was a much looser body than the Guild; while every warlock she spoke to seemed more or less to acknowledge its authority, at least within the city walls, no one mentioned rules or discipline or death threats when discussing the Council. The membership of the actual Council seemed to change fairly often— since it was nominally composed of the twenty most powerful warlocks hi the city, its members were also the warlocks most likely to hear the Calling and vanish without notice.
She wasn’t sure just who the current chairman was; Sarai was fairly certain that Mavis of Beachgate had left the city, either Called or fleeing southward by ship, hoping to get farther from Aldagmor before the Calling could claim her.
Luralla would know, though; she had the warlock called in and asked her to take a message to the chairman of the Council. Those groups were the important two, but for the sake of thoroughness, Lady Sarai considered the others.
Only a minority of theurgists had any connection with the Hierarchy of Priests; Sarai wasn’t sure whether
